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When it boils down to it, the demons inside of a person are much scarier in a real-world sort of way as well. =)

I'm looking forward to seeing how the civilized creatures clash in the setting... I'm usually the sort of fellow who picks 'n' chooses what he wants from a setting and making up the rest. One thing I've never touched on is racial problems but I could see this happening in SK for some reason. =D

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/*~Matthew Miller~*\

As in "troll the ancient yule-tide carol"

Poul Anderson made that joke in "Three Hearts, Three Lions" circa 1960 or so.

We knew that.

Josh

Hey Josh! Hm, I wasn't making a joke that I was aware of. Just talking some etymology. But yeah, it does come up in Deck the Halls, which is cool. It's a good word for trolls in SK partly because of the singing/artistic connection.

What is the joke in Three Hearts and Three Lions? Just a pun on a troll singing that song?

The hero, whose name I forget, is off to fight a troll. One of his companions asks if he isn't afraid. "Arfaid", he replies, " Who's afraid of a Christmas song?"

"Huh?"

"Troll the ancient yule-tide carol....."

All laugh.

If you haven't read "Three Hearts, Three Lions", you really owe it to yourself to do so. It's a very old book by now, but it's one of the founding novels of the entire fantasy genre. It's one of the earliest "guy pulled into a fantasy world" novels and I think the first to milk the situation for humor. (Or maybe DeCamp's "Incomplete Enchanter" is).

At any rate, while a lot of the tropes of the novel have become staples of fantasy fiction, this is where they came from. And it's a quick, light-hearted little read, not great literature, very little early SF/Fantasy was, but a reasonably good book nonetheless.

Josh

PS. Tried to get the guys I game with to try out the combat primer tonight, before the game, but they wanted to watch "The Prisoner of Zenda" instead. Silly Mortals. Will try again next week.

J.

Yes, sir, it would. =)
Basic game stats would be easy to hammer out... I'm more interested in the sorts of crazy things that can 'awaken' and gain true sentience. While I've seen the basics of magic is, what I haven't seen is precisely what it can do.
I get crazy ideas about golems* and humans getting fused together through some bizarre transmutation experiment. Maybe I'm thinking too much about D&D's Genasi... I just like the idea of a part stone, part flesh creature. Natural is less interesting than an accidental creation resulting from the abuse of magic.


I kinda wish you would post the names of the magic traditions to fuel my imaginaaation!
Is there a school of magic dedicated solely to Transmutation? If there is, is it a pretty free form sort of thing? By free form... A character casts the Earth Transmutation spell, with it he can mold such materials into whatever he wants.
Sort of reminds me of a question I wanted to ask... There is alchemy in the game, I assume. Is there much support for it?

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/*~Matthew Miller~*\

Mac, I seem to have missed responding to your post. Sorry - ok, let's get to some answers here!

Alchemy - oh yes, there is a lot of support for it. The fixer class is brimming over with alchemical goodness, and there are... I'll say around three dozen alchemical items detailed in the game, plus the poisons, so maybe 10 more. I'm going off my memory here, since I'm on vacation as mentioned on the home page, and one of the deals I made with my wife was that there'd be no SK on the vacation (I know, the horror, the horror! :) ). And the Research chapter gives you rules support for developing many more variations on the items that are here. Truth be told, I sometimes wonder if I erred by including classes that could be seen as gadgeteers, the engineer and the fixer. Although the fixer has a social/underworld/healer thing going on besides being just an alchemical brewmaster.

Magic schools. Your wish is my command! The six styles of magic are Dramba, Incandescence, Druidic, Battlecraft, Hearts, and Language of Stars (also called Color of Stars). There are six more grand styles. Golems are in the default game in a variety of ways. There are alchemical golems that are flesh fused with corundum or bark or sadness (remember emotions can be permanently ripped out of people). There are also homunculi and hollow knights crafted by the Spellsmiths (whoops, did I just mention one of the six grand styles?).

In general, magic is more toward the prescribed results end of the spectrum than the freeform Mage:tA end of the spectrum. There is a lot of room for interpretation of form and results, but the schools have a definite list of close spells and high spells, plus a few high secret spells - and that's it, no other knowledge is known to the school.

SK - welcome! The pacing and structure aids are optional, first of all. I don't presume to know what pace works best for everyone, and I've seen a lot of people that enjoy much slower paces than I do. That said, one of the aids is a "scripted game" approach where you plot out the session like a novel: "Combat - Dialogue - Chase - Dialogue - Dialogue - Combat with a reveal" and then that reveal marks the end of the Beginning of the story. The players and GM fill in the specifics about the scenes with some simple guidelines (no meaningless rolls, the scene must have a conflict, the conflict must be resolved one way or the other). But the main thing is that they cross off the scene types as they go, the plot keeps moving forward, and there are a variety of scenes and twists guaranteed to come up in a session.

Another pacing aid is the option to play any "split party" time in scene order. Whether you're back in the village after raiding the pirate haven as a party, or administering to your guilds in separate areas of the city, the scene order playstyle keeps things humming. The turns are resolved quickly, there is a set amount that you can do in a turn, and there's a specific place for organization actions and how you can influence the wider world (change the culture, influence the economy, etc.).

Then there are Investigation and Exploration aids. To my mind, investigation scenarios are often where the pace of an RPG session flags. So there are pacing guids for that, including a threat system kind of like 3:16 Carnage in Space and a "no meaningless scenes" rule that means that either the investigators are advancing or else they're crashing and burning in ways that are going to be at least as meaningful as the investigation.

More tools - but no demands. These are all optional. You can totally play SK like a good old-fashioned 70s/80s party-based one-ten-foot-square-at-a-time game.

Dice can explode multiple times. That is more clear in the final book, sorry about that. So you keep exploding as long as you keep rolling max!

About dice, skill elvels, and actions worth taking - that is definitely not the case in SK. In fact, in SK, the "whiff factor" is kind of up to the group. The default target number in an area - called the doom - is tied to magic and the king. If you start your campaign where I recommend, the doom is 3. (By the way one of the nice things about the doom mechanic is that GMs don't have to struggle wondering what a good target number for something is.) So even if you're not trained in something, with a slightly above average characteristic score of 6, you still have a 66% success chance against a typical task. So you do not need skills to have a change at success. On the other hand, you still have a 33% chance of failure, but if you have a skill at rank 1, then you're rolling a d8 instead of a d6, so you have a 75% chance. That 10% increase is noticeable and worth it, but it's still worth rolling if you don't have it. And of course all this doesn't even include inspirations or mood, and the bonuses that they can give. Frankly I think it's pretty important that people succeed a lot of the time. Whiffing isn't fun. Of course, if you start your campaign in Dynn, or Muda-tarsk, or the An Rach district of Azenahal, well, then... you're just asking for it! :)

Don't worry about it, champ. =) Right after I posted that question, you threw up the Fixer class preview which answered quite a few questions by itself.
Those are some interesting sounding magic schools! Can't wait to delve into the specifics. =D

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/*~Matthew Miller~*\